Renamed SineSpace holds summer festival this weekend

The festival will include contests, live music, carnival games, a roller-coaster, movies, fireworks, and tours of the platform.

SineSpace is a browser-based virtual world created by Adam Frisby, one of the co-founders of OpenSim. It is completely unrelated to OpenSim, however, using Unity as its back end platform.

Adam Frisby

“We’ve been out in public beta now for over six months, so we’d like to throw a party for all our users and creators,” Frisby said in a statement released today. “[We’re] celebrating what they’ve been up to, and the progress we’ve been making building the next generation virtual world platform.”

Today, the company announced that more than 1,500 developers have signed up on the platform. It did not disclose the number of users or the number of destinations on the platform.

Frisby added that the name change makes it more distinctive and unique.

Googling “space” brings up more than 3 billion results, with SineSpace nowhere near the top. “SineSpace,” on the other hand, comes up first in that Google search.

“[We’re] setting ourselves up for our next stage,” Frisby said.

The company has been releasing new updates, including new camera controls, Vivox voice chat, in-world webcams, and a new login screen. Plus, it rolled out in-world editing tools for user’s rooms, currently free to registered members.

A Floorplan room. (Image courtesy SineSpace.)

“We have in-world modification tools for personal regions via the new Floorplan editor we added earlier in the year,” Frisby told Hypergrid Business. “If you create a region inworld using the ‘Home’ button, you can check them out via ‘Edit Room’.”

Like many Unity-based applications, SineSpace is not map-based. Each region in SineSpace is its own self-contained environment, and users travel between them using teleports. By comparison, Second Life and OpenSim grids are map-based worlds, where all the destinations exist on a flat map and users can walk or fly between adjacent areas.

Flying over the SineSpace welcome center. (Snapshot by Maria Korolov.)

Another major difference is that the in-world content creation tools are very limited.

For the bulk of building, creating a new environment or clothing or other in-world content requires the use of the Unity editor in combination with the add-on SineSpace editor pack — instructions and tutorials here.

Users can, however, buy new content, including appearance items, through the built-in marketplace and change their appearance by wearing different objects from their inventory.